We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.
Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.
And the biggest antibiotics defying pathogen of them all is MRSA (pronounced “mersa,” it stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Kristof reminds us it “already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.” A new strain, ST398, has emerged.
Kristof blames the overuse of antibiotics in healthy animals for the antibiotic resistance in both people and animals:
[T]he central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.
The Pultizer-prize-winning Kristof is no foe of farmers. He grew up on a farm and has tuned in to food. He called for a Secretary of Food rather than a Secretary of Agriculture and followed-up after Vilsack’s appointment suggesting a Deputy Secretary of Food.
Still, over at ScienceBlogs Mike the Mad Biologist says there’s better evidence:
The problem I have with Kristof’s column is that MRSA ST398 isn’t a hypothetical. The reason the spread of MRSA ST398 into the healthcare system scares the crap out of me isn’t that it might happen: it’s already happened. We already have documented evidence from the Netherlands, where ST398 has started to show up in the healthcare system in agricultural regions of the country. And in Sweden, ST398 is present in the community.
These are countries with reasonably good antibiotic use policies, so I’m not exactly optimistic. I’m glad Kristof raised the issue, but the reflexive conservative denialists will attack the column, when he could have provided much stronger evidence.
Kristof’s column is a follow-up to another last week, Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health, in which he discussed hog-to-to human transmission of MRSA. The pork lobby’s rebuttal calls that piece “highly speculative.” Mike expected as much:
The other gambit the ag lobbies will use is analogous to the smoking lobby: we don’t know for certain, blah, blah, blah. In the antibiotic resistance surveillance field, it’s known as ‘statistically sound sampling.’